


i know what i want, but i just don't know

by fiveaces



Series: come and go with me [4]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1950s, Alternate Universe - 1960s, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, It's Implied Though, M/M, Period-Typical Sexism, teddy boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 18:30:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19156567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveaces/pseuds/fiveaces
Summary: The part that Ada hadn’t accounted for when keeping her end of the deal was just how dense Tommy was. It was like hewantedto get caught. He was subtle, of course, but if one looked close enough, like Ada, Tommy was about as inconspicuous as a lighthouse in bad weather.





	i know what i want, but i just don't know

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Manic Depression" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The thing about being in a large family is that Ada rarely gets peace, and when she does, there’s a pulsing ache around it, like it’s not meant to be. She knows what it means to be a Shelby, their roots are long and complicated, and when they settled in Birmingham all those generations ago it was so that they could grow comfortably in a place that wasn’t truly theirs.

Ada longs to get out from that rut and travel, but she’s just a girl. That’s the problem.

Her brother Tommy, on the other hand, doesn’t have that problem. But he still remains stubbornly stuck in Birmingham, working away reluctantly in his record shop and collecting money in a jar he won’t tell what for. Ada once caught him hiding it underneath the loose floorboard of his single room squeezed in the back of the house, as if he was concerned that one of the others would start stealing money away from it. He hadn’t noticed her, and Ada hadn’t let herself be known, curling her fingers into a fist and fighting the urge to shout at him, feeling hot shame rise up in her cheeks in the face of his mistrust. Tommy is more of an animal than a man sometimes, a jumpy sort of look about him, ready to bolt for better purposes the minute he gets the chance which, apparently, he hasn’t gotten around to having yet.

Ada has a faint idea about why he’s biding his time, she is his sister after all. He’s closer to her than the others, something which hasn’t gone unnoticed by the general public, or school yard bullies. Funny enough, once Tommy developed the muscle for it, though not the height, he’d become one of those types too, in a fashion. Cigarettes, booze, the inability to catch a hint from annoyed girls; he was the whole fucking package. For the longest time Ada used to think that Tommy was just like any other guy, following in the footsteps of every Shelby man in the family, until she caught him with his hand shoved down Richard Milton’s pants one overcast afternoon and then he no longer was Tommy, annoying older brother and leader of a ragtag bunch of teenagers. He instead became Tommy, still an annoying older brother, but also someone who needed more of a helping hand than he let on. He had yelled at her when he found out she knew, eyes wild, before calming down and making her promise that she wouldn’t tell anybody. Ada wasn’t an idiot, she knew what happened to kids like Tommy; kids like her.

The jar made more sense after that encounter, and so did the jumpiness. 

_____

The part that Ada hadn’t accounted for when keeping her end of the deal was just how dense Tommy was. It was like he _wanted_ to get caught. He was subtle, of course, but if one looked close enough, like Ada, Tommy was about as inconspicuous as a lighthouse in bad weather.

And then Alfie Solomons had to get into the mix and Ada was on the edge of her seat watching Tommy make an absolute fool of himself.

“You’re unbelievable,” she says the morning she catches them in bed after a night out. Tommy’s hair is a mess, and he’s still tangled up with Alfie, who’s looking about as calm as one can be. “I can’t fucking believe it. What if one of the others walked in and not me? You’d be toast. The both of you.”

“You said everyone would be out,” Alfie tells Tommy, and then eyes Ada with amusement. “Hello, Ada. You’ve got a habit of barging in unannounced, I’ve been told.”

“Fuck off,” says Ada. “You’re an idiot. And so is Tommy.”

“So you keep on saying,” Alfie muses, and gets up to rest on his forearms. “Say, you don’t mind if I stay for breakfast do you? Tommy here was kind enough to invite me. Awfully sweet of him, innit?”

Ada lets out a frustrated sound, running her hands through her hair and ruining her curls she’d carefully pinned up last night. Great. “F-Yes. Okay. Just, clean up and act like you two haven’t been necking all night.”

Tommy shoots up in protest, eyes flashing. Ada’s sure he’s ready to retaliate with indignant squawks of his so called virtue, and spares herself a headache by shutting his bedroom door with a pointed bang and stomping down the stairs. Nobody’s home this time of the day, either off working or cavorting around God knows where. Even Finn’s kipped down to a friend’s house for the afternoon, leaving Ada alone in a tiny house that suddenly feels impossibly big, and that familiar ache sets in her bones again, making her heart jump in her throat.

She thinks about a lot of things during these moments, when the world seems to be at a standstill and the only things moving are her own chest and the dust particles that glow in the sunlight coming in from the windows. Distantly, she hears muffled thuds and curses from Tommy’s bedroom, and then laughter, and puts on the kettle on the gas stove and decides she won't do anything else besides that.

She wanders into the living room after, curling up in the second-hand settee off to the side to read. It’s Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_ , an old water stained copy she’d bought for five pence in a store that sells that sort of stuff, because there isn’t anything else for her to do besides read. She can’t work, she can’t study because school’s out, and for the life of her, she can’t go for the holidays by herself without a chaperone. Of course, nobody wants to be that chaperone, and so Ada’s landlocked in the Shelby home. Sometimes she slips down to the park or the shops to stop feeling like she’s wasting away her time, watching the seconds tick by slowly on the old grandfather clock that stands silently in a corner of the living room.

Tommy clomps down the stairs by the time she’s at the part where the Creature demands for a wife, and she looks up from a yellowed page to see Alfie following him close by, hands shoved in his pockets with both eyebrows raised high in amusement.

“Tea?” Tommy grunts when he notices her. Alfie stops right behind him, seemingly looming over his shoulder though they’re nearly the same in stature.

“In the kitchen,” she replies, pretending to be disinterested in the display before her. She reads the same sentence five times by the time she says, “You can make breakfast by yourself. Bread’s on the counter, eggs in the fridge. You know the rest.”

Tommy goes to the kitchen and she hears the cheerful rattle of the cups and plates, and the yelp Tommy lets out when he touches the kettle’s body instead of the handle, same as usual. There’s a moment’s silence before he calls out to her, “Hey, you didn’t make the tea!”

“I turned on the kettle, that’s enough,” Ada calls back, folding a corner of the page she’s at and tucking the book in-between the musty cushions of the settee. “If you wanted a proper breakfast you should’ve woken up when you had the chance.”

More grumblings from the kitchen. She hears the hiss of oil as it hits the pan, and then the crackle-pop of eggs cooking. Curious, Ada picks herself up from the settee to see Alfie standing over the stove, cheerfully tapping out a tune on the floor with a socked foot and flipping the eggs over. He’s turned just so he can see Tommy, who’s leaning against the counter and watching the toaster sullenly as it works away to make toast. It’s old and rusting at the edges, but it’s still got some use in it, and that’s what matters in the end. Well, that, and they can’t afford to replace it for a long while yet.

“What’re you doing after all this?” she asks, leaning casually against the doorway with her arms crossed. Alfie’s the first to look up from where he’s focused on the eggs, and his eyes flit quickly towards Tommy before coming back to rest on Ada. “The usual, like?”

The usual being something Ada isn’t privy to, and not sure she’d _want_ to be privy to, given how much Tommy and Alfie have taken to spending time together. The others can’t see it for more than what it looks like on the outside: two boys making a quick friendship for no other reason than boredom and the desire for something, anything, new. Well, she’s sure that’s what it looks like to the rest of the family, except she’s seen the clever eyes Polly assesses the both of them with when she thinks no one is looking, and not for the first time in her life Ada wonders what it would be like if she and Tommy just _told_ the family what they’ve kept secret for so long. But then, reality hits her over the head and Ada shakes herself up from idle daydreams. No matter how much someone can love you, she’d learnt a long time ago, they can just as quickly turn their backs on you when the time comes when you need them the most.

“Dunno,” Tommy says offhandedly, fishing out the toast gingerly and placing another set of bread slices inside the slots of the toaster. “There’s plenty to do. Yard work. The cinema.”

“Yard work,” Ada says drily. “You’ve been watching too many American films. We don’t have a yard.”

Tommy shrugs, and Ada sees the moment he puts on his usual expression. Gone are the slumped shoulders and the softness around his eyes, he’s much like Polly in those types ways, weaving in and out of closed off faces and open postures as easy as breathing. Ada supposes it’s a survival instinct for the both of them, except they seem to be the only two in the entire family to have developed it properly. “Someone else’s yard work.”

“There’ll be no yard working when I’m around,” Alfie speaks up firmly while he plates the eggs. He starts on the tomatoes next, Ada didn’t know they had tomatoes. “What were you reading back there, by the way?”

Ada blinks, looking around and then pointing at her own chest. “Who. Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Oh,” she says. “ _Frankenstein_.”

“ _The Modern Prometheus_ ,” Alfie hums, and then quirks up his lips in a semblance of a smile. Ada’s not sure what to make of it, and darts her gaze towards Tommy who’s looking at both of them like he’s watching paint dry. “It’s a very good read.”

“Yes,” says Ada. “I suppose it is.”

“You _could_ go into a deep discussion of the hidden messages behind Shelley’s words, and how she crafts so-and-so through the narratives, and uses such-and-such to create an extended metaphor about the pain of humanity or fuck knows what. But who gives a shit, eh? It’s a book. It’s read only because someone went through the effort of writing it. And if you don’t like it, then you can always chuck it in the bin. You’ll like this one, though, I’m sure of it.” Alfie fries the tomatoes with the single minded focus of a man who cares about nothing but God himself, and he burns about half of them by the end. It unnerves Ada greatly, to see him like this. The most she knows of him is through five minute stilted conversations about the weather and the news, before Tommy swoops in and whisks Alfie away to anywhere except Small Heath.

“Okay,” is all Ada can say. “I’ll do that, then.”

“Don’t listen to what I say,” Alfie advises, picking up the plates and nudging Tommy with his big toe to sit at the kitchen table. “Most of it’s hot air, anyways."

Ada ponders over the fact that maybe Alfie’s trying to tell her something profound about how her life is hers, and she can take it by the reins and steer it towards where she wants to be headed. But somebody else has the leash, and Ada’s a hapless follower, decked out in floral sundresses and kitten-heeled shoes, walking blindly into the unknown. She’s about as far away from doing whatever she wants with her life just as she is to finishing her book.

In the end, she tries not to make much of it. It’s Alfie who’s telling her all this crap; he makes eyes at her annoying older brother over breakfast and spills tea on the kitchen table just so he can see Tommy flush angrily at having to clean up the mess. Whatever he has to say, Ada decides, must be taken with a healthy amount of salt.

She goes back to the living room and lays across the couch with its sunken cushions, closing her eyes and listening to the sounds around her: the steady putter of a car engine outside, the distant noises of a city in prime-time rush, Tommy and Alfie in the kitchen bickering loudly over late breakfasts. The air feels weighted, warm and lucid with a faint smell of woodsmoke from the fireplace, and Ada dreams.


End file.
